Review: OUTLYING ISLANDS, Jermyn Street Theatre

In a room carved underground the better to shelter from the hostile environment above, a group of disparate individuals assemble, some excited, some filled with a sense of foreboding. There’s provisions, joshing good humour and a frisson of anticipation at the prospect of witnessing something no other human being has ever seen.

But enough about an opening night at the Jermyn Street Theatre, what about the play? 

On the eve of World War Two, two Cambridge grads in Fair Isle jumpers, Robert (English, Bertie Woosterish, charming) and John (Scottish, insecure, held back by ingrained Calvinist attitudes) arrive on a rocky island on the edge of the Hebrides.

They’ve been sent by The Ministry to survey the bird population, but the smalltime laird, Kirk (of course, Kirk) knows there’s money to be made, as London doesn’t send a couple of bright, if inexperienced lads all that way to count seagulls. He has a niece, Ellen, who has been transfixed by the glamour of, er…, Stan Laurel in the ‘pagan’ cinemas of Stornaway, from which we surmise that she has led a sheltered life and that she might not want to be so sheltered any longer. The lads, as lads do, clock it, Robert licking his lips, John with a tingling fear. 

Two decades, one pandemic and one European war on from its premiere, David Craig’s sparkling play is both old-fashioned and terribly relevant for our uneasy, disconnected days. Staged with an intensity by Jessica Lazar, brilliantly assisted by David Doyle’s lighting and Christopher Preece’s sound, it’s crucial that the performances trap us as much as the characters, and they do,

The key lies in the early establishment of The Island itself. Once we buy that, the door opens, even in this godforsaken place (literally so, we’re in an abandoned chapel) to the seductive allure of transgression. We know about The Lord of the Flies, we know about The Wicker Man, hell, we even know about Love Island! Misbehaviour looms, but will we still believe in the toff, the kid and the girl?

It’s Whitney Kehinde as Ellen who anchors the action. She has to show the woman-child’s repressed energy, her release at the midpoint of the narrative and her ballsy fearlessness. But we cannot lose sight of where we are and when - one whiff of a 1960s hippy chick in Ellen and the play will drift off into the ocean to be sunk by its failing credibility. Kehinde, with a look that lasts a little too long, a voice and vocabulary that aches with desire and Jennifer Fletcher’s super work on movement, manages all that superbly, a wonderful example of the highly specific art of acting in tight spaces.

Bruce Langley brings the posh boy’s confidence to Robert, but has real fire in his eyes when he realises the true nature of the operation, his idealism/entitlement crumbling in the face of the Realpolitik of their mission. He’d be ripe for recruitment to The Apostles’ spyring. Fred Woodley Evans is winning as John, puppyishly trailing in Robert’s wake, but cannot quite deliver on his act three transformation, though he’s not helped by a rare scene in which the script doesn’t quite convince and the hitherto electric tension dissipates. Kevin McMonagle, embodying PG Wodehouse’s line that  'It is never difficult to distinguish between with a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine’, stays just the right side of caricature as Kirk.

This is the kind of play that one sometimes sees at the Finborough Theatre, a revival that does not rely on shoehorning in hot button issues, but uses all the tools available to theatre to tell a story that reveals an unexpected, but undeniable, relevance for today. For those with a penchant for such old school crafts, this production is a rare delight. 

Outlying Islands at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 15 March

Photo Credits: Alex Brenner

 

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